"Only 8 percent of global organizations believe their performance management process is worth the time they put into it, but the race is on to change that". – Josh Bersin.

Today’s Performance management only offers an illusion that the annual process gives feedback to an employee to drive individual performance . In reality it only justifies the rating and the annual increment. Inability to Motivate, inexperience of managers to have performance dialogues, mercurial engagement levels of supervisors, incapability to assess cross functional collaboration, focus on targets than building competencies are a few ills in today’s systems.  The current performance management practice is being rendered obsolete in managing today’s complex work environment where the managers are facing a unique predicament previously unknown in the 80’s or 90’s.

1. There are and will continue to be multiple generations in the workplace – a) Traditionalists b) Baby Boomers c) Generation X d) Millennials e) and soon enough the Generation 2020.
2. Teams now are based not just across multiple locations in one geography but across time zones across the globe .
3. There is an overload of information available; Sifting through will only enable to reach out to  relevant people data.
4. Enterprises no longer have just a linear hierarchy, but a matrix organization structure.
5. Employees of today need to collaborate and coordinate with multiple stakeholders.

The inevitability of a redesigned and effective performance management process is just in our face today.Now this is much easier said than done! Concentrating on a culture of feedback and employee development, the new age Performance Management will address the following:

Spotlight on Employee Development – Transformation in the Performance Management has enabled the employees and managers to perceive the performance assessment differently. Rather than an annual backward looking process, managers will now sit down for continuous performance dialogues. The conversations will be forward looking and will only discuss what the supervisor sees for the employee in the next 12 months.

Employee goal setting not a top down approach but a dynamic agile and frequent process – Goal setting can no longer remain as a once a year exercise stemming from the goals of the manager and their supervisors. A certain flexibility and agility factor needs to be built in to keep aligning to the change in business and organizational strategy leading to individual employees. The goal setting process will be enabled to share goals and team view of goals to foster a culture of collaboration.

Social Performance Management – Employees today are rather disconcerted with the minuscule and far and between feedbacks. More so, the millennials are hard wired to have an ongoing dialogue. Herein technology comes in rather handy with the use of social tools in any HCM Cloud System to foster continuous dialogue or social recognition. The long and short of it is – Gone are the days of an annual meagre snapshot, the days of continuous feedback with social elements are here.

Two Heads are always better than One – With individuals applying their unique skills, a cross functional team always comes up with an effective solution. With the rise of geographically spread diverse teams, an emerging trend is the necessity to provide for shared goals allotted across teams.

Absolute Performance than Relative Performance – No Force Fit into a Bell Curve – The bell curve is being widely done away with! This brings in a sense of collected efforts achieving a common goal collaborative. No longer would it mean that Employee A would be relatively ranked against Employee B. An employee’s performance will only be measured against set performance standards and benchmarks.

Inclusion of Peer Feedback – Use of mobile friendly performance management APPS – Team members will be encouraged to provide feedback to each other on their goals to create a culture of peer feedback and recognition. This can happen through the use of mobile friendly CLOUD HCM products. Social feedback come as an inbuilt feature in today’s HCM solutions.

Focus on the Lower than Average Performers – The Performance Management process should not merely act as a sieve to filter put the bottom performers and wean them away from their organization. It is pertinent to rethink the performance standards and the development mechanism to develop and reskill the less than average performers and fit them in roles where they would be able to perform their best.

Disjoin the Compensation and Development Conversations – We need to remember that there can be no “entitlement thinking”. Organizations are now mindful of the fact that compensations will be based on several factors apart from performance such as Customer Orientation and Impact, Dearth or abundance of skills, Competencies. Although this is a tough stance, the time is near when compensations and ongoing developments will run parallel.

In the days to come, performance management will evolve to become real time, bespoke, monogrammed to each individual and not regressive. Leaders will assume the role of coaches for personal and professional development than just evaluate targets achieved. The crucial question will be the evolution of a “Growth Mindset”. Another important facet will be the delinking of the Compensation dialogues from the development dialogue. At the end of the day, leaders now need to understand how to manage a global set of diverse workers and create systems to enhance their careers while accomplishing business results and personal fulfillment.